104 Yoga for Speech-Language Development
“The light in me sees the light in you; Bow to me; I’ll bow to you”
(Wenig 2003). The lyrics of Kira Willey’s version include the line
“I honor you as you honor me.” In yet another Namaste song, which
is sung to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus” by Karma Kids
Yoga, the words state “My little light bows to your little light.” One
commonality across the various Namaste songs is presence of the
personal pronouns “I,” “me,” and “you” or their possessive forms
“my” and “your.” From a linguistic perspective, these pronouns are
considered deictic terms in that they shift reference depending
on the speaker-listener roles (Pence Turnbull and Justice 2017).
The pronouns “I,” “me,” and “my” always refer to the speaker;
the terms “you” and “your” always refer to the listener. Children
hearing and singing these songs experience the use of these forms
in a deictically appropriate way.
Children with ASD often experience challenges in using these
personal deictic pronouns. Typically, they do not make the shift
from second to first person pronouns, which reflects a problem in
form/use interactions. For example, the child who says “you like
yoga” following the adult’s query, “Do you like yoga?” uses the
latter part of the prior adult utterance for his own. This atypical
language behavior reflects the child’s difficulties with deixis
described above (Kim et al. 2014). In the foregoing example, the
child did not make the deictic shift from person spoken to,
the second person, in which the pronoun “you” is appropriate,
to the speaker role, the first person, in which the pronoun “I” is
correct. Linguistically, the child mistakenly uses these pronouns
as if they were static forms with stable referents rather than as
dynamic forms, which shift with speaker-listener discourse role.
Shifting reference is particularly difficult for children with ASD
because of their difficulty with abstraction and lack of flexibility
(Paul and Norbury 2012). Like echolalia, these errors do not occur
in all children with ASD, but are more common in individuals
with autism than in other clinical populations (Kim et al. 2014).